Picture This—Mischa Willett
"No one ever puts her hand on my belly to feel the bun in my poetic oven..."
Stack Takeover: Mischa Willett. Over the next two months, we’ll be reading poetry from Mischa every week, including four poems published for the first time on this Substack. For an introduction to Mischa, read Ben Palpant’s interview with him here.
Picture This
No one ever puts her hand on my belly to feel the bun in my poetic oven, looks over my shoulder to see one in process and the mother never coos to hers, look Honey, he’s using words; you have a set of those at home don’t you? So I was unprepared at the beach, having bought a watercolor set to try to paint the sea, not only because I hadn’t brought water, but socially, for the stop and gawking that the passers- by seemed entitled to. There I’d paint blue to oooh, and by the time the sailboat erected its thin mast, sail plumed slightly in salty taupe, I’d been the Pied Painter of Alki Point of an afternoon, embarrassed slightly by the inevitable moment when some walker would decide I’d wasted his time and huff off, indignant that I should have called him over for this! This sail without wind, this blue-green sea without moving, the one gull’s hanging like his attention--tenuous and breaking—a blank in the sky!
From Phases (2017).
Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is the author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.
"No one ever put her hand on my belly to feel the bun in my poetic oven..." elicited a string of chuckles and a new found empathy for the masculine literary type pregnant with poetry and unseen possibility.
I think next time he oughta take those word magnets and lay them out in the sand, and construct a poem about the beach in that way, and then maybe he’d get some oohs and ahhs over his poetry in process.